Thread by @Tinkzorg

Let's do a short thread on this incredibly common misunderstanding because why not.

https://twitter.com/PalmerReport/status/1447302193934217220

Here is the thing: war is kinda like sex. No matter what you've heard about it, a surprising amount of it is actually fairly *consensual*. This is a fantastically important point that most people seem to miss.

What does "consent" mean in this context? Well, imagine a weapon system, like, say, an AH-64 Apache. This is an aircraft designed to provide air support and blow up tanks. For it to be effective, the enemy has to consent to a form of warfare where there are tanks to blow up!

This isn't getting into whether the enemy is able to shoot one of these babies down or not. For an Apache to actually do much of anything useful, the form of warfare being waged has to occur within certain boundaries. Ergo: the war has to be a specific *kind* of war.

In warfare, consent can be *denied*. As in: actor A has a military that will most certainly win if the war is fought in a manner where A has an advantage over B. Therefore, B simply *refuses* to be fixed into the constraints where A will certainly win.

The word "guerilla" - (meaning little war) comes from just such a denial of consent during the Napoleonic wars. There was no way for the spanish to ever win against Napoleon. Anyone who tried got smashed. Therefore, the spanish simply refused to engage.

Instead, they opted to open up what Napoleon himself came to call the "spanish ulcer", fighting in such a manner that the *overwhelming* french advantage in warfare simply didn't matter.

Libs are going "Oh man the US army would just SMASH all these maga chuds, look at our tanks! Look at their chobham armor! Look at those Rheinmetall 120mm smoothbore cannons, firing M829 "Silver Bullet" armor piercing, fin-stabilized, discarding sabot tank rounds! Wow!"

But in reality, that smoothbore cannon is almost completely useless without consent. The sort of war that would be fought in the US - given the comparable levels of dominance that the US armed forces to Napoleon in his day - would echo the spanish ulcer.

Specifically, if you wanted to fight the US army, you wouldn't smuggle in some soviet junkyard T-34 and try to fight a US armored division. You'd use the most simple yet effective tactic in the book - ambush tactics, blending in with the civilian population.

Those AR-15s are more than enough to do a fairly fucking good job at this kind of warfare, because the point is not to form a tercio square out on some marching field, but to simply kill the enemy when their guard is down, and then melt away.

During Operation Banner - the british army's operation to keep a lid on northern Ireland - they deployed at most around 20.000 troops in an area about 2% the size of Texas. The Texas national guard comes in at 18.000 men, and Texas is, well, 100% the size of Texas.

Moreover, the official casualty ratio during the (decades long) operation are fairly telling. The british army sustained 1500 killed, and killed a bit over 300 people (again, officially). Out of those 300, fully 50% of those were innocent civilians.

That means that the british army reported a *ten to one casualty ratio* against the enemy. Spoiler alert: the british army in fact had tanks. And aircraft, and even nuclear warheads. The IRA had none of those things. And yet the british army didn't simply roll over them.

So what did the IRA have, if they didn't have tanks, fixed wing aircraft, nuclear submarines, or armored cars? Well, they had AR-15s. They in fact liked them so much they even wrote a song about them!

In closing, let's return to the US situation for a bit. The US armed forces combined will probably struggle to amass even 100.000 people you can really hand a M4 and tell to patrol Anytown, Idaho, keeping a look out for y'all Qaeda. The US army is *not* that large.

It's not designed to wage counterinsurgency in a country the size of the US, it's mostly designed to fight "near-peer competitors", to use the parlance of the Pentagon. That is, enemies that will *consent* to the sort of warfare where its shiny toys are likely to be of use!

Libs are flippant about this, because they don't understand this concept of consent. Without that consent, warfare against an enemy - especially your own population - is an *incredibly* gnarly affair.

Some estimates put the death toll of the Cristero war in Mexico to a quarter of a million people (!). The Cristeros didn't have tanks either, nor chemical weapons, recoilless rifles, airplanes, or even uniforms. And that is exactly what made the conflict so destructive.

The US is very, very big, it is incredibly polarized by region, the US army recruits from the areas that the army would likely need to suppress, and modern infrastructure is incredibly easy to disrupt. The US power grid is particularly easy to knock out.

In closing, libs simply don't know how to rule. They think this shit is somehow "free", that all a ruler has to do is press the big red button that says "boom" and then all the enemies get blown up. But that's not how it works.

Far from being assured of victory, the US armed forces are in fact fairly ill-prepared for any scenario approaching that of the Troubles - or especially that of the Cristero uprising. Meanwhile, all the libs can do is content themselves with fairly tales. The end.

Whether a civil war or a troubles scenario is *likely* is of course another question entirely, but the idea that it is *unlikely* due to "lol we'd just use our indestructible tanks to blow the chuds up" is such an incredibly foolish misconception about what warfare is.

END NOTE: the IRA in fact mostly used Armalite AR-18s, not AR-15s. Though for libs, they might as well be the same gun (and they are pretty similar in operation), which is why I stated they used AR-15. I apologize to any maga chuds who might have taken offense at this fibbing.